On Anti-Semitism and the state of Israel

There are certain phrases used to dismiss opponents and end arguments that really get under my skin, because they tend to be used by people who can't make a real argument for their side, and yet with a certain small minded type of idiot, they seem to work.

One we've seen a lot lately is "hate America". Anyone who disagrees with anything President Bush says is said to "hate America", when in truth speaking out against improper behavior (factual or perceived) in our governmental officials is one of the most American, most patriotic things we can do, and the fact that we are free to do so is one of the defining qualities OF America.

Another one we've been hearing a lot of lately is calling someone an "anti-Semite". This invariably comes up whenever anyone expresses anything other than 100% support for Israel and 100% condemnation for Hezbollah in the current conflict.

But how are we ever supposed to make any headway in brokering any kind of peace with this sort of opinion? Secretary of State Rice started her trip over to that troubled region saying she was only going to meet with Israeli representatives, she had no plans to meet with Lebanese or Hezbollah representatives because they were terrorists and we do not negotiate with terrorists. Well, great, how will we ever broker any kind of peace agreement between the parties when we're excluding one of them from the talks?

And similarly, how are we ever going to make any headway with the Islamic contingent of this conflict if we don't at least pretend to some impartiality. Look, it's a war. There are atrocities and tragedies on both sides. This conflict between these two opposing ideologies has been going on for years, the idea that we can easily point to who started the current “war” is ludicrous. Yes, the triggering event was the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah forces, but I'm sure if you asked Hezbollah, they would say that event was in retaliation for some other event... which was in retaliation for some other event... etc.

This area of the world is like two little children fighting over the same coveted toy. Taking the toy from child A and giving it to child B and announcing that the toy now belong to child B doesn't solve the problem if child A sincerely believes the toy was his to begin with.

Which brings us to the question that people keep trying to ascribe to liberals, although in truth the only people I've heard mention it are conservatives claiming it's the view of liberals: does the state of Israel have a right to exist.

Let's take a look at the history of the modern nation of Israel. First off, it was formed in a fashion pretty unique among nations: it was created by a 1948 United Nations treaty. That treaty drew out a specific boundary that belonged to Israel, and since then, Israel has dramatically increased their boundaries.

Keep in mind, the city of Jerusalem is holy in three different religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. With this in mind, the original UN decree left Jerusalem as a UN administered international region belonging to neither party, but since that time Israel has declared Jerusalem to be its capital and has essentially taken it over, along with expanding its borders by taking over such areas as Sinai (returned in 1982), the Gaza Strip (returned last year), the West Bank and Golan Heights.

Now, for its part, Israel is surrounded by hostile countries (no wonder, remember this was essentially the same in our previous metaphor of a parental figure coming along and taking away one of their toys and giving it to a rival child) and has to be hyper vigilant because one lost battle and they're screwed.

Still, they have not been blameless over the nearly 60 years of their official existence, and clearly the Islamic peoples of the region have reason to be angry as well. Some of "their" land was taken away and given to people they regard as heathens, people who then proceeded to annex a city holy to Islamic culture. If it had happened in reverse, you can bet we'd be angry. If the U.N. tomorrow decided to carve out a chunk of Italy and create a Palestinian state, and over the next few years the Palestinians decided to annex all of Rome and make it their capital, would not Catholics be a bit miffed?

So, let's proceed from that starting point. Let's recognize that both sides have legitimate concerns, questions and complaints, and then attempt to move forward to resolve some of them.

Anything else will never even BEGIN to make steps towards a lasting peace. It may not ever be possible, but it certainly won't be if you start out by dismissing the concerns of one of the two parties you're trying to get to the negotiating table.

And if you can't do that, at least have the decency to stop smearing anyone willing to look at the region with an open mind with a label such as "anti-Semite". I don't hate the Jewish people. I don't hate Israel. But I recognize that in any human endeavor, both sides have points and concerns, and it does not mean I am against Israel that I recognize that their opponents also have real concerns and real complaints.

Liam.

A Democrat Learns the Wrong Lesson About Democracy

Joe Lieberman has decided to learn a very bad lesson from the current Presidential Administration.

At least according to this post over at Huffington Post, Mr. Lieberman has decided that in a democracy, the only people elected representatives should listen to are those that wholeheartedly support that elected representative.

Mr. Lieberman, it was (and is) offensive when the President stacks the deck with rabid supporters at his speaking engagements, barring dissenters not only from the hall, but shunted off to the side in ironically named "Free Speech Zones", as if the First Amendment were not an absolute, only applying in certain places at certain times.

So Joe Lieberman has chosen to emulate this most odious of elected officials tactics, and he wonders why Ned Lamont is doing so well against him in Connecticut polls.

Mr. Lieberman, until you leave office, you represent ALL of CT, not just those who voted for you, not just those who agree with you. Your job is to understand the will of your constituents and then represent that will and their interests in Washington, not to represent your own will and interests, and then refuse to interact with anyone who disagrees.

It's no wonder the people of CT have had enough.

Liam.

False Outrage

As regular readers have pretty likely sussed out, I have few regular readers. So this space is generally a place for me to vent about anything that's bugging me, and today it's trumped up, fake outrage.

In particular, the big news story yesterday and today is about the latest Republican expression of outrage that one Democratic Party group or another has put out a television ad that shows flag draped coffins returning from Iraq.

The talking point is that it's unconscionable, disgusting, and that the speaker has never seen something so distasteful in their entire political career.

Several people have pointed out that the Bush Administration, during the 2004 election season, ran several ads showing the World Trade Center attack and in at least one case, showed coffins of those who died on that day.

The standard answer is that it's worlds different to remind the world how important it is to be vigilant and what our enemies would like to do to us again, vs politicizing the deaths of our brave service men and women who are over there fighting on our behalf.

But guess what: In both cases, it's about telling the world what the party thinks they want to hear.

The Bush campaign politicized 9/11 (and continues to do so), deficit-spending political capital in order to start wars of aggression in countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 and were no real threat to our safety and security. They believed that people would respond to a message of fear, the old "Don't change horses in mid stream" argument, and they ran with it.

The Democratic Party now believes that the majority of Americans want the Iraq war over, and are coming to believe that that war was unjustified, unnecessary, and have resulted in the deaths and permanent maiming of countless young American lives for at best no purpose, at worst (and most cynical) the purpose of driving up profits for the uber rich of the President's base.

And so they do not see showing the coffins as capitalizing on the deaths of the soldiers, they see it as reminding people of what five and a half years (and counting) of Bush Presidency and Republican rule has brought us.

The fundamental argument of the Republicans is that to bring home the troops dishonors those who have died, and to suggest that the troops come home is not to support them.

Well, if my son or daughter was over there fighting, and I felt the way I feel about this war, knew what I know about this war, I'd think the very pinnacle of support you could give my child and all of his fellow soldiers would be to get them out of harms way as soon as humanly possible.

Our troops are, by and large, great people. Brave, honorable people who just want to protect our country. To have this most noble of our country's resources squandered is what's disgusting. To talk of supporting them by letting them STOP risking their lives on a fools mission, that's true support.

And besides, I think it's time that the American public were reminded that, contrary to what Press Secretary Tony Snow says, 2500 dead soldiers is not "just a number". We SHOULD be seeing the coffins come home. We SHOULD be seeing the images of the horror of war in Iraq. If the nobility of purpose of the war will not survive public scrutiny, then we shouldn't be there in the first place.

Liam.

Voting Rights Act: A Question

Does anyone out there understand what the issue is with the Voting Rights Act?

It passed the House today, which is good, but it was voted against by a number of Southern Republicans, who made statements about it punishing their states for past offenses which have long since been remedied.

My first impression on reading that was to think "If you've fixed the problem, then it shouldn't be an issue whether correct behavior is codified in law or not".

But I got to thinking about it, and I have to think that the word "punishing" is far too strong for simply enacting a bill that criminalizes certain anti-democratic voting practices, so there must be more to it.

Is anyone who reads this regularly familiar with the details of the voting rights act? Is there some specific onus put upon the southern states whose misdeeds originally spawned the Act? Are there some continued reparations or costs those states are forced by this bill to bear?

I was incensed last week when it looked like Congress was going to try to quietly let the Voting Rights Act die, opening the door for a return to the days of poll taxes and voter registration tests containing such questions as "How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?" (an actual question used to "disqualify" black voters in the past).

But I have to think that there is no political gain for anyone in NOT passing a bill so fundamentally to the core principles of democracy, and so there has to be more to it than that, and everywhere I've looked, I've simply found people repeating the problems the Act was originally enacted to fix.

If you know more, please share! (Otherwise, I'll probably end up doing a batch of research on it this weekend).

Liam.

About Friggin' Time

Finally, something that should have been a no brainer from day one. According to this AP article (posted on Yahoo news), the Bush Administration has finally decided to "grant" Geneva Convention rights to the detainees and Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

This represents a huge setback to the Presidential power grab, nearly five years after the start of the war on terror, that the President does not have the power to arbitrarily create new categories of people and then claim that traditional rights do not apply to those people.

The fact is, prior to the start of the so-called War on Terror, there were essentially two categories of people in custody: Prisoner of War and non-wartime criminals. Those in the first category were clearly covered under the Geneva Convention, those in the second were covered by our Constitution and our laws (which dictate the powers and procedures of our government, even when dealing with non-citizens).

It was never anything but semantics to define a new category ("Enemy Combatant" and then claim that this new category was due neither set of protections.

And finally, after far too long a time, the United States has been steered back onto the path of morality again. Finally, we have to admit that such word parsing and re-defining does not allow us (or our President) to circumvent the laws of the nation.

Good for us! A proud day to be an American.

Liam.

The Times Responds...

I got this snippet of a column in the NY Times by Nicholas Kristof from the Huffington Post. There is a link at the bottom to the full Times article, but it requires a fee to read, so it is clearly improper to repost the entire thing here.

Nevertheless, the part which was posted on Huffington Post (and by my understanding is therefore in the public domain) goes pretty far in summarizing my feelings on the press, so I will reprint it here. The Huffington Post article on the subject can be found here, and the NY Times column can be read here.

When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage (backed by delusional Journal editorials baffling to anyone who was actually in Iraq) misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. In retrospect, the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it.

Historically, we in the press have done more damage to our nation by withholding secret information than by publishing it. One example was this newspaper's withholding details of the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. President Kennedy himself suggested that the U.S. would have been better served if The Times had published the full story and derailed the invasion.

Then there were the C.I.A. abuses that journalists kept mum about until they spilled over and prompted the Church Committee investigation in the 1970's. And there are secrets we should have found, but didn't: in the run-up to the Iraq war, the press -- particularly this newspaper -- was too credulous about claims that Iraq possessed large amounts of W.M.D.

In each of these cases, we were too compliant. We failed in our watchdog role, and we failed our country.

So be very wary of Mr. Bush's effort to tame the press. Watchdogs can be mean, dumb and obnoxious, but it would be even more dangerous to trade them in for lap dogs.

Read entire column at http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/opinion/04kristof.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Your Senate Inaction

(No, I didn't miss a space in the title of this).

If you need a good example of how out of touch with reality our leadership is in this country, you have only to watch this past weekend's Meet the Press and the debate between Democratic Senator Charles Schumer and Republican Senator Mitch McConnell.

Coming out of that segment of the program, there can't be two more textbook examples of the term "weasel" than these two men.

Andrea Mitchell, guest host for the week, asked a number of probing questions, and the answers were sickening.

Mr. McConnell spouted rhetorical talking points of dubious veracity. He repeated the claim that not having been attacked again means the war in Iraq was a good idea and has been successful and completely IGNORING the fact that the war in Iraq has bred much greater anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world and elsewhere than it has solved.

But Mr. Schumer was even worse, waffling, equivocating, and refusing to answer even the simplest of questions. Right now, Democrats across the state of CT are considering whether they wish to be represented by a man who calls himself a Democrat but behaves like a Republican, and yet the Democratic leadership of the DSCC (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) are making implications that they plan to nominate Joe Lieberman even if he does not win the electoral primary in Connecticut, raising the question of what exactly is the point to a primary if the parties' leaderships are free to ignore their constituents and their members? Mr. Schumer, a member of the DSCC, was asked several questions about this an said that he wasn't willing to speculate because he was supporting Lieberman in the primary and wasn't prepared to speculate on “what ifs” when he believed Lieberman would win. He similarly waffled when asked about his take on a Hillary Clinton campaign for President, answering that right now, she was running for Senate re-election, and again, he did not wish to “speculate” beyond that.

Increasingly, I think the whole lot of them (or at least all of them who are running in 2006) should be shown the door. There are rare exceptions. Republican representatives John Duncan of TN and Ron Paul of TX, both apparently willing to stand up to party leadership and President on Principle. Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, who may not stand for everything I stand for, but who seems to be out there trying to come up with solutions even when they disagree with his Democratic leadership. I'm torn about whether to include Joe Lieberman on this list. On the one hand, he's definitely willing to stand up to party leadership for his own reasons. On the other, those reasons appear to be entirely political and not based on principle at all.

Regardless, watching this weekend's edition of Meet the Press serves as a depressing reminder of the caliber of people we have serving as our leaders and the desperate need for a near complete housecleaning.

Liam.

You Say "bin Ladin", I Say "bin Laden", Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

According to the New York Times, the CIA has shut down a ten year old unit whose primary mission was to hunt down Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda operatives.

Now, I am of two minds on this. On the one hand, if they've been searching for bin Laden for 10 years, that means they started about five years BEFORE the nation-transforming events of September 11, 2001 and were thus spectacularly unsuccessful in protecting American lives. After ten years, it's about time to accept that this isn't a successful unit.

On the other hand, have we replaced it with anything? Has our manhunt for bin Laden and his top associates been reduced to one old retired guy in Bermuda shorts walking the desserts of Afghanistan and Pakistan with a metal detector and a tube of SPF 75? (The article does say that the CIA still considers this a priority, but it definitely feels like one more resource being pulled off of a case that should have been successfully closed years ago).

But as is so often the case, the most interesting part of the article is not in the headline, it is in the text. It is in this quote from the article:

The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

Consider for a moment what has caused this fracturing of the main group into countless smaller, quasi-independent groups. It is not the events of 9/11. It is not particularly dissension in the ranks at the core al Qaeda group. It is the disastrous and insanely conceived war in Iraq.

We brought a war to the people of Iraq, a country which (although ruled by a bad man) was one of the most progressive and stable in the Islamic world. Women had far more rights in Hussein-led Iraq than they have today. And neither the government nor the people of Iraq had anything to do with our being attacked on that fateful day five years ago.

WE broke their country. WE caused the deaths of untold numbers of Iraqi citizens (estimates ranging from around 30,000 to over 100,000). WE tortured innocent and guilty alike in Guantanamo Bay, abu Ghraib and at other sites around the world. WE made it clear to the world that the main thrust of our war on terror was a war on Islam, whether we admitted it or not, we certainly found it easy enough to substitute one Arab culture for another when it came time to wage the war.

There is absolutely no surprise to be had in the fact that the Islamic world believes we have them, as a whole, squarely in our sights, and so we really shouldn't be surprised that al Qaeda has become a hundred little al Qaedas, all sharing a hatred of us and all drawing inspiration from the grandfather group. The main body of al Qaeda is squarely in OUR sites (at least, so our news would have us believe, how often have we trumpeted the capture or killing of some new number three guy?), tactically it makes far more sense for a new convert to the religion of hating America to form his own group, under the radar and only loosely affiliated with al Qaeda, than to join the main body of the group, already in progress.

We are reaping what we have sown, we dare not fall for anyone claiming this is a success in the fight on terrorism, or a justification for more of the same.

Liam.

On Hatred, Responsibility and Patriotism.

[NOTE: On yesterday's post entitled "More stomach wrenching. More disgust...", someone posted a reply saying that he or she felt that my hatred of Bush made me attribute responsibility for the horrible events described in that post TO Bush. I began writing a reply, and it got longer and longer and eventually I decided that it was too long to post as a reply to another post, but deserved to be posted as a separate entity unto itself. However, since it is intended as a response to that comment, I have not modified it from the form in which I originally wrote it. --Liam]

No, not particularly. In fact, in the first posting on this topic I specifically said that I didn't think this was something that necessarily went any higher than the men involved.

However...

There are aspects of this which are important to consider. First, we are in a war for no defined reason. There were no WMDs, there is no link between Saddam Hussein and the events of September 11, 2001. There are far more oppressive and evil regimes on the planet right now if we're there for humanitarian reasons. Iraq only became a central front in the war on terror (to the extent that it is one) when we destabilized it and when our continued inept occupation bred increased hatred for us in the region.

Having foolishly spent our armed forces resources on this ill conceived war, instead of actually capturing Osama bin Laden and taking apart his al Qaeda network entirely, we now have the prospect of an increased war on terror (without the support of the world) instead of a limited one (with that support), and our armed forces are getting tired and worn down and new recruits are not joining in anything like the numbers they once did. In order to combat this, the Armed Forces have had to lower their requirements for who they will accept. Many people who would previously have been considered too unstable, too unintelligent, or too old (such as myself) are now eligible under the new guidelines, and that makes for increased possibility of situations like Haditha and this one happening, as people who are either unfit for following orders, or too weak emotionally to withstand the rigors of war without cracking end up in situations they really shouldn't be in.

And so now, instead of staying out of a war we shouldn't have been in, OR going in with sufficient personnel to start with such that we could actually have kept the peace and rebuilt the country in a timely fashion, we have a civil war going on, and we have atrocities like these going on, we have a situation so unbalanced that we can't HELP but breed more and more people ripe for being taught that we are the “Great Satan” and that there is no more noble calling than to martyr themselves in holy jihad against us.

I don't know your situation, but for me, I imagine how I would feel if it was my daughter, or the daughter of one of my friends, that was brutally raped and murdered by members of an occupying armed force. My first reaction wouldn't be “these must be a few bad apples in an otherwise noble force”, my first thought would be “these [unprintable] come into our country, depose our leadership, and now they're raping and murdering our daughters. I'm going to fight them to the last breath of my body, and will raise all of my children to resist them to the ends of THEIR lives”.

So, do I think Bush (or Rumsfeld or the Generals) are directly responsible for this? No. But they do have us in this situation, one which I never agreed with from the start. They continue to bungle it, refusing to either get us the hell out and let the country sort itself out OR send in the number of troops needed to really control the situation on the ground.

Oh, and by the way, you refer to my hatred for Bush, as others have before, as if I am motivated by some blind, irrational hatred without justification. You need to understand, I didn't come by my feelings regarding the man and his administration (I don't believe “hate” is exactly the right word, “fear” might be closer, or a mixture of fear and disgust) due to his politics or anything else preordained. Initially, when he was elected, he was set to be what Jimmy Carter was: An inoffensive President who didn't get much done, but who let us all heal from the tumult of the preceding Administration. I didn't vote for him, but only because I strongly believe the country is safest when the President and the Congress are checking and balancing each other, and I don't believe that properly happens when they're from the same party.

But at some point, Bush and those he surrounds himself with got the idea that they could ignore the Constitution, grow the government (with the support of the party of smaller government), increase Presidential power (with the support or at least acquiescence of the Congress who is thus diminished), and seize and hold power with Orwellian double speak like “No Child Left Behind” (a program which leaves a lot of children behind) and the “Clear Skies Initiative” (which allows far more pollution than was previously allowed).

He brings up political hot topics to divide us, such as gay marriage, flag burning and immigration and mixes in a healthy dose of fear mongering (how many more times can scary things happen just at times when they're most needed to bolster sagging approval numbers before people wise up?) and then tries to define anyone who engages in free speech and dissent as unpatriotic. He relegates dissent to “free speech zones” at his appearances, as though this Constitutionally protected right is something to be regulated or controlled when it is inconvenient. He and his party suggest that certain outlets of the press are treasonous and should perhaps be punished when they report news which may be politically harmful to the President, as though a free press keeping tabs on our elected officials weren't vital to our nation's continued health.

Let us remember that he “won” initially on the basis of fewer votes than Mr. Gore had, not only nationwide, but it's been determined that Mr. Gore actually won Florida, too, on every recount that's been done. One particular group recounted the ballots something like nine different ways, using each of the different proposed standards for determining who the vote was intended for, and in EVERY SINGLE CASE, Gore won the popular election. And then in 2004 he again “won” under extremely suspicious circumstances. Read the RFK jr. piece in Rolling Stone from a month or so back, or most of what's been on the Brad Blog over the last couple of years for a documented list of irregularities, any small number of which might be explainable, but which taken together are hard to dispute as an organized (and successful) attempt to steal a Presidential election. I believe George W. Bush has not been a legitimate President of this nation at any point.

What I don't get is how ANYONE can continue to support the man. Conservatives should abhor his record level spending and insane record setting deficits, as well as the growth of government when at heart conservatives are for smaller government. Constitutionalists should be very frightened of his flagrant disregard for the laws of our land, eschewing the veto as the legal method for disagreeing with a Congressionally passed law for the political equivalent of crossing his fingers and saying that it doesn't really count, thus taking away from Congress the ability to override his veto (since he never made one) and to force him to follow their will as the only government body Constitutionally empowered to pass laws. Environmentalist should note the extent to which he, virtually alone among anyone not in charge of a major company, refuses to accept that we have to do something about pollution and global warming, and indeed has taken us in the OPPOSITE direction in a number of ways. Those who want us to be safer from terrorism should cower in fear at the level of animosity he has built up since the near-universal good will in the aftermath of 9/11, as he has directly been a better recruiting tool for al Qaeda and anti-Americanist groups than anything those groups themselves could have done.

The ONLY people who should like this guy are the leadership of large corporations and perhaps the uber rich, a group of people who together make up far less than 1% of the total citizenry. Our nation should not be run by, or for the benefit of, 1% of us all, and its core principles and values should not be entirely dismantled in the service of those 1%.

There is almost literally no one who should like the job this guy is doing nor the damage he's doing to our country, our name, our reputation, our planet and our future. The sooner he (and those he's thrown himself in with) are out of power, the sooner we can start healing as a nation. Honestly, it seems so very quaint that less than 10 years ago we were all hot and bothered because someone had an ill conceived affair, something that really only affected himself, his wife, and the object of his improper affection. All of that justified impeachment, but yet dismantling the Constitution piece by piece, deficit spending us into ruin and just ignoring any law that doesn't suit him is just fine?

So, does all of that add up to hatred? Or does it add up to honest, patriotic concern? If I try to take a child away from an abusive parent, is it because I hate the parent, or because I care for the well being of the child? Our nation is that child, desperately needing rescue from a most unfit parent, and it is my love for that child which makes me speak out as I do, not some preconceived idea that the parent was a bad person, until his own actions with regard to the child proved him to be so.

Liam.

More stomach wrenching. More disgust...

[This is really a sickening story. I think it's an important one, but as with the beheadings of Daniel Pearl and others, it's hard to know how many details are important and how many are too many. Certainly in that earlier case, I knew what had happened, but carefully avoided seeing the video. So I'll just leave this large disclaimer at the top: I won't think any less of anyone who has had enough of the story of the latest outrage in Iraq and doesn't want to read any further. --Liam]

More details are out regarding the premeditated stalking, rape and murder of an Iraqi woman, the murder of her family, and the burning of her body.

Specifically, the term "Iraqi woman" in earlier reports is somewhat misleading. She was a 15 year old girl.

She passed almost daily through a checkpoint manned by the alleged purpetrators (U.S. soldiers). They made lewd suggestions and come-ons to her, so much so that she complained to her parents that she was afraid of them. Her parents had made arrangements for her to begin living with a neighbor (to make it harder to find her), but the attack happened before that plan could start.

Liam.

Understanding our Opponent

[2/3/06 UPDATE: Here is a new article which indicates that apparently the investigation is looking into whether this particular heinous act was planned for a week before the deed was done. It makes me want to throw up. --Liam]

And finally for tonight (skip down three or four articles and read up from there for the chronology of tonight's posting frenzy), I think it is important for us to get a sense of what is being done in our names.

As I've said before with the Haditha story, I don't believe that this necessarily reflects directly on the Administration, but I do believe that behavior like that described below does a lot to undermine our position both in the world and in the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

WARNING: This post and the article to which I link contain descriptions of some really disgusting alleged behavior on the part of American troops. It is disturbing, but it is also important to know about, and to consider how we'd respond if someone occupying our country behaved this way. Important to understand all of the things we do that engender further attacks against us in the future.

According to this article and others I've read, several soldiers in Iraq conspired to stalk and capture an Iraqi woman, rape her, then murder her and the three other members of her family (including a child) and burn her body (ostensibly to hide evidence of the sexual assault).

This case is being investigated, along with the Haditha killings.

But next time someone on the pro-war side of current events talks about how we're fighting terror, or making America safer, just think about this case. Imagine it happened to someone in your family or your town. Or heck, imagine it happened anywhere in America at the hands of an occupying force. How would you react? Would you stop to consider that the people involved might not represent the true will of the occupying nation? Or would it further reinforce in your mind that the occupying country was "the great Satan" and should be fought using any means available?

We need to do our level best to clean up the mess we have created in Iraq. We need to do it quickly, we need to understand that the entire fiasco has made us less secure and more hated in the region and spawned a new generation that will aspire to grow up to be jihadists and martyrs. We need to do all we can to fix our mistakes, and then we need to get the hell out and let the Iraqis have their country back, let them stop being an occupied country and start to be a nation again.

Liam.

P.S. To be clear, I do believe that these actions do not represent the bulk of our armed forces, but they still reflect on them and on us in the eyes of the Iraqis and the world. And, to a certain extent, cases like this are probably more common now than in the past, now that the Army, in order to have any kind of success towards recruiting goals, has stopped turning people down for certain types of mental illness or prior criminal behavior. Lower the standards on who you will accept into the Army, and you will have a lower standard of Army. That still doesn't mean the vast majority of our fighting men and women aren't honorable and brave people putting everything on the line in defense of their country. It just means that the small percentage of miscreants and misbehavors (and those likely to snap under the pressures of combat) gets larger when you stop being quite so selective.

Do YOU believe in the Constitution?

Item number three for the day is this article in the New Yorker magazine, which indicates that both Colin Powell and his former top adviser Lawrence Wilkerson share the opinion that David Addington, current Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney "doesn't care about the Constitution."

Mr. Addington, the article goes on to note, has been a central figure in crafting the Administration's legal justifications regarding the War on Terror.

There's no additional point to this, certainly just because one person in the Administration doesn't care about the Constitution doesn't mean there aren't others on the team watching out for us citizens and our Constitutional rights.

Then again, this is a man who works for a President who is widely reported to have told staff members in a meeting to stop waving the Constitution in his face, that it was just a damn piece of paper.

This is also a man who has been central in crafting a strategy for war which seems consistently to not concern itself with our morals and principles as a nation, the whole litany that I've repeated often, from the new "Enemy Combatant" legal limbo status to extraordinary rendition to the use of torture (or rather, the re-definition of techniques we'd probably all consider torture if used on us or American citizens to be classified non-torture and then used) to secret CIA prisons in so-called "torture friendly" countries.

One more little piece of evidence, all of which together seems to add up to a President who wants to turn the Presidency into a Monarchy, the United States into a dictatorship. Take out the Congress with signing statements and blatant disregard for Congressional decree (such as building a set of small databases which together would comprise the "Total Informational Awareness" program the Administration was told by Congress not to build, claiming that by not putting them all into one database, they're not violating the Congressional edict). Take out the Judiciary by painting them as activist and working to reduce or eliminate their jurisdiction. Take out the press by taking every opportunity to paint them as traitors and anti-American and then hope most Americans will either stop believing the press or will not object when the Administration steps in to "control the loose cannons endangering the troops and American lives". Take out the Constitution by simply ignoring it when it doesn't suit their fancy.

Take out democracy by subverting the electoral process and the will of the people (I still don't believe that in a single election the exit polls could be so vastly off from the official result in so many places when it was entirely unprecedented in this history of exit polling for the official result to differ by more than the statistical margin of error from the exit poll result).

Maybe it's too late at night. Maybe my bad back and minor stomach flu are making me especially negative tonight. But that's the view I have of America, and I want my country back. I want my country to be one I believe in and can be proud of again.

Liam.

Gay Foster Parents

The second issue I wanted to touch on today is this statement by Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee: I'm very disappointed that the court seems more interested in what's good for gay couples than what's good for children needing foster care.

On Thursday of this week, the Arkansas state Supreme Court unanimously struck down a ban on gay couples serving as foster parents in that state, on the grounds that the preponderance of evidence fails to show any negative effect on children raised by homosexual couples as compared to heterosexual couples.

But the part of Mr. Huckabee's statement that I find the most odious is this: it is my understanding that there is generally a shortage of qualified foster care families to take care of unfortunate children who end up in the foster care system. As a result, anyone who can provide a stable, loving environment for these children should be encouraged. Far from having the interests of gay couples at heart, in fact the Court has the best interests of those foster-eligible children who might otherwise end up in orphanages or other state run programs for lack of sufficient foster providers.

In other words, Gov. Huckabee in making his claim is actually putting what's good for his own political career in what seems to be a generally right-wing leaning world over what is good for children in the foster care system. To have this level of self-interest-trumping-compassion, and then make such an odious false charge, that's disgusting.

I nominate Gov. Huckabee for Keith Olbermann's next list of Worst Persons in the World.

Liam.

The Times Uproar

[UPDATE: There's a wonderful joint statement that's been put out by the editors of the NY Times and the LA Times, normally rivals. It can be read here and is well worth a read. It should especially be read by anyone considering leveling a charge of treason or seriously considering any sort of officially sanctioned censorship of our news media. Someone on the Fox morning program earlier this week actually suggested (seriously) that we needed a "Department of Censorship", as though that wasn't in diametric contradiction to our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. Read the statement, it might shed some new light on how the press actually makes these decisions. --Liam.]

It's been a while since I posted much in the way of updates on here, but today we've got several. First, there's a report on a recent Countdown with Keith Olbermann (I don't know which day, I've gotten behind on watching them, so I just watched the last three day's worth or so on my TiVo) regarding the hullabaloo surrounding last week's NY Times article on the “secret terrorist financing tracking” program.

The article dealt with a U.S. program to access and monitor the databases of the "Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications", or SWIFT. Much of the response has been to denounce the Times as traitorous, unpatriotic, and damaging to our national security. The Administration and its supporters and apologists have made the somewhat ludicrous claim that if this article hadn't come out, terrorists would have had no idea that we might be trying to track their financing, in spite of the fact that it's been reported before that al Qaeda has taken to trying to hide their moving of money by doing it though banks in countries where the requirements for information gathering is looser, a step which they clearly would not have taken, if they didn't believe we were trying to track them.

Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow said that he was quite certain al Qaeda was unaware prior to the Times article of the existence of SWIFT.

But that argument becomes almost ludicrous when you discover that SWIFT has a web site, http://www.swift.com. This web site states clearly that one of the organization's goals is "Cooperating in the global fight against abuse of the financial system for illegal activities". SWIFT also puts out a magazine, called "Dialogue". So clearly, as Mr. Olbermann put it, SWIFT is about as clandestine an organization as Wachovia.

But back to the original argument that this program and our tracking of terrorist financing was somehow a great secret, Countdown then goes on to play a montage of no less than nine times over the last five years in which President Bush has publicly stated that we had programs dealing with the finances of terrorist organizations. In one, from September 24, 2001, Bush says "today we have launched a strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network". Three months later on December 20th, "the assets of more than 150 known terrorists, there organizations and their bankers have been frozen by the United States". So we're to believe that al Qaeda could find us trying to shut down their financial transactions but be unaware that we were tracking their financial transactions?

The best quote, though, is this one from March 23, 2004 (coincidentally my brother's 36th birthday), "We've got a strong network of cooperative governments trying to chase down terrorist money, and to prevent that money from being spread around to cause harm."

So you tell me, was there really anything new in the New York Times article, that President Bush had not himself already told the nation, the world, and of course the terrorists (who almost certainly track his public statements)?

Or does it look more like a tempest in a teapot, much ado about nothing, this uproar over the Times article?

All I can say is this: Be very careful before you go buying into the meme that the Times should be censured and reigned in. Because to me, this looks like one more power grab by the Administration, this time in the form of trying to discredit and justify muzzling our free press. They may not be much, and heaven knows that since 9/11 they've been seriously lying down on the job, but we're certainly much better off having them then not.

And I ask you this: If the Administration truly is doing nothing wrong, not violating any of our laws, what reason could they possibly have for trying to shut down the free press, particularly over a story which becomes increasingly clear was not in any way harmful to our nation.

Liam.